2. Web Servers
The workings of the Web involve communication between two
computers:
• a server
• a client.
The server delivers a file when a client asks for it.
A growing number of software vendors provide web servers of varying
strength and capacity and for a variety of platforms, all of which meet
the requirements of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
3. Web Servers
• A server is technically not the hardware, but the software—you
should invest in server software that will stand up to your intended
use and be supported by the vendor.
• Most vendors will also recommend hardware configurations.
• This combination of software and hardware is critical if you wish to
• optimize response time
• your connections per second
• your throughput
4. Web Browsers
• Web browsers are applications that run on a user’s personal
computer (on the client side on the Internet) to provide the
interactive graphical interface for searching, finding, and viewing text
documents, sounds, animations, and other multimedia resources on
the Web.
• By mid-2001, only two serious competitors remained: Netscape and
Microsoft
5. Web Browsers
• In designing a web site, then, you should be certain that your
documents and plug-ins work and look good using Internet Explorer.
6. Search Engines
• They will ferret out information for you in seconds, information that
would take months to find searching in a traditional library.
• Individualized personal search engines are available that can search
the entire public Web, while enterprise search engines can search
intranets, and mobile search engines can search PDAs and even cell
phones.
7. Web Page Makers and Site Builders
• HTML documents are simple ASCII text files saved to disk without any
formatting at all—no bolding, underlining, special fonts, margins, or
tabs.
• Professional web page developers often use only a word processor
like BBEdit for the Mac or WordPad in Windows rather than, HTML
page builder, and they insert text and tags into their documents
manually or with personalized shortcut keys and helper scripts.
• For other powerful options beyond plain HTML, knowledge of
Dynamic HTML (DHTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used.
8. Plug-ins and Delivery Vehicles
• Plug-ins add the power of multimedia to web browsers by allowing
users to view and interact with new types of documents and images.
• Helper applications, or players, also provide multimedia power by
displaying or running files downloaded from the Internet by your
browser, but helpers are not seamlessly integrated into the operation
of the browser itself.
• Many plug-ins are designed to perform special tasks not available
without the plug-in installed.
• If you land on a web page containing embedded, compressed images,
for example, and the proper plug-in to decompress those images is
not installed, you will not be able to view the images.
9. Plug-ins and Delivery Vehicles
Text
Text and document plug-ins such as the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader
get you past the display limitations of HTML and web browsers, where
fonts are dependent on end users’ preferences and page layout is
primitive.
10. Plug-ins and Delivery Vehicles
Images
• Browsers enabled for HTML5 will read and display bitmapped JPEG, GIF,
and PNG image files as well as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files.
• Vector files are a mathematical description of the lines, curves, fills, and
patterns needed to draw a picture, and while they typically do not provide
the rich detail found in bitmaps, they are smaller and can be scaled without
image degradation.
• Plug-ins to enable viewing of vector formats (such as Flash) are useful,
particularly when some provide high octane compression schemes to
dramatically shrink file size and shorten the time spent downloading and
displaying them.
11. Plug-ins and Delivery Vehicles
Sound
• Sound over the Web is managed in a few different ways.
• Digitized sound files in various common formats such as MP3, WAV, AIF, or
AU may be sent to your computer and then played, either as they are being
received (streaming playback) or once they are fully downloaded (using a
player).
• MIDI files may also be received and played, these files are more compact,
but they depend upon your computer’s MIDI setup for quality.
• Speech files can be specially encoded into a token language (a “shorthand”
description of the speech components) and sent at great speed to another
computer to be un-tokenized and played back in a variety of voices.
12. Plug-ins and Delivery Vehicles
Animation, Video, and Presentation
• The most data-intense multimedia elements to travel the Internet are
video streams containing both images and synchronized sound, and
commonly packaged as Apple’s QuickTime, Microsoft’s Video for
Windows (AVI), and MPEG files.
• Also data rich are the files for proprietary formats such as Keynote,
Microsoft PowerPoint, and other presentation applications.
• In all cases, the trade-offs between bandwidth and quality are
constantly in your face when designing, developing, and delivering
animations or motion video for the Web.
